Any particular issue with it? The Piranha with High-Velocity Barrel and Smart Choke will annihilate things, particularly with a Infiltrator shotgun build. Or on a Vanguard, that can be fun. Bonus points on Destroyer and yelling "Feeding time!" on the voice comm. Well, not yelling per se. But still.

I see you have it at II, so maybe having it at X is coloring my evaluation of it.

I just didn't like it. It's like the striker and Kysrae. So much explosion going on you can't see if you're hitting anything. My playstyle is distance and accuracy, the piranah can do neither of those things.

I just topped a silver match. Cerberus so nothing special but i thought i'd have a go instead of quitting when someone got bold after an easy match and switched it up. Like the money, didn't really enjoy the round even though it went quite well.

My playstyle is distance and accuracy, the piranah can do neither of those things.

If you can only play distance and accuracy, then Piranha won't be your bag. Nor Reegar, nor Claymore, nor Raider. Frankly, either learn an alternative playstyle, or accept that you will have a miserable time getting the Shotgun challenge.

It's not a better playstyle than distance and accuracy, it's just different. The point of different guns and the breadth required by the gun challenges is to make you try something new. You can't fit all weapons and classes to fit one playstyle. Each requires a different touch to be effective. Variety is the spice of life, after all.

So I'm almost done with Lone Wolf. 5 Bronze, 2 Silvers down. 1 Silver 2 Golds left to go. I've done it with a few different characters ... Quarian Marskman, Destroyer, TGI, KroGuard, Geth Infiltrator. The TGI has been the easiest, by far ... if you get in trouble, just pop some stim candy, cloak and retreat.

If you like range and shotguns, choke a Wraith and it gets ridiculous range. That circle is kinda misleading, put enemy heads in the middle of it at medium range and watch the headshots roll in.

However based on the shotguns you've expressed dislike in, I think your problem is simply not willingness to go close enough. Get closer so you can hit them with your shotgun, then shoot it.

My two cents, though, is that this isn't about a playstyle or weapons. If you've played the thousands of waves it takes for all the Alien challenges and you're still uncomfortable with anything above Bronze, the problem is most likely you have some bad habits you're not letting go, not a particular shotgun or play type. I have a preferred playstyle, too, but the only way you're going to get better is to use each class and weapon the way they were meant to be used.

so pick a shotgun class and get closer. Then shoot them in the face! You'll be surprised how easy it is after the first few times of dying four thousand times as you learn how to use cover and right hand advantage at close range.

I mean if you have fun doing what you do? Then do it. But if you want to start taking on silvers and golds? Think of this as an opportunity to expand your skillset.

I'm not all that fussed about silver and gold. It does seem to expected that people move up but when it comes down to it i enjoy things easy and without a mic to get some proper teamplay going on it's hit or miss at harder levels. I can play silver, i can lead silver, but i don't find the reward justifies doing so. That limits my income and thus gear but i'm ok with that. I'm gradually getting some better kit and now i appreciate some of it a lot more than i used to.

I can adjust to different playstyles. As you said i wouldn't have got through some of the challenges without doing so. SMG mastery and the parts of shotgun mastery i've got require close range technique. I find running up and faceshotting stuff less amusing than i do popping off heads at range. I play for enjoyment and the interesting moments of randon team synergy.

I'm not all that fussed about silver and gold. It does seem to expected that people move up but when it comes down to it i enjoy things easy and without a mic to get some proper teamplay going on it's hit or miss at harder levels. I can play silver, i can lead silver, but i don't find the reward justifies doing so. That limits my income and thus gear but i'm ok with that. I'm gradually getting some better kit and now i appreciate some of it a lot more than i used to.

I've lost track of how many times I've said this: I hate playing Silver.

Bronze is so easy that it does not require strategy - unless you have 3-4 completely new players, most teams are extracting. Silver pays double the credits and XP of a Bronze match in around double the time (inexact measurements); however the degree of difficulty is a lot higher than Bronze.

People playing Gold generally* have a solid understanding of game mechanics and strategy; successful Platinum players have an advanced grasp of the same. In my experience Silver players are either moving up from Bronze and still learning tactics, or dropping down from higher levels and completely disregarding them. The difficulty level of Silver means that it requires teamwork and coordination - combine difficulty level of Silver with team behavior and reduced payouts, and you see why I don't bother with it.

Gold is more rewarding than Silver in terms of challenge, fun, and payout. It's more than double the credits of Silver in about 1.5 x the extraction time (inexact). Playing Gold will complete your manifest much faster. If you can top the leaderboards on Silver, you can be effective in Gold. Platinum is a grind of a different sort - you are very limited in terms of kit/build/strategy compared to Gold; it's pretty much a credit grind. It's similar to the jump from Bronze to Gold in terms of difficulty, but it's less actual fun - especially when PUG-ing.

Of course if it suits you, you can always grind gear at the rate of 17k credits per Bronze match.

Josh - In my experience silver isn't usually double the time of a bronze, but I agree the ramp-up between difficulty levels is uneven.

Average pub bronze in my experience is about 16-18, silver 22-25, gold just under 30, platinum I haven't paid attention to times to get averages yet. "Good" clears of each are about 14, 18, 25, but those aren't what I rely on in a pub, and at that point map matters to a somewhat large degree. And you're right, the higher up you go in difficulty generally the more self-selecting the playerbase is.

I'm aware I come at this from a different pov than Wraith; I pub unknown/unknown/platinum now. But I think, regardless, you can still have your cake and eat it too when it comes to "teamwork + spacebux + fun times," just like you.

That said,

Josh A.K.A CLF wrote:

Platinum is a grind of a different sort - you are very limited in terms of kit/build/strategy compared to Gold

I don't know about this part though. What matters in plat isn't so much your kit/build/strategy as it is what are your teammates doing. Biotics should work in pairs, minimum. An all tech burst team is amazing, etc. You probably want at least one person with boss-killing stupid high levels of DPS. But you can get those a lot of ways.

I know it's popular to think the only classes that can take plat are the ludicrously OP ones so AHI, TGI, AIU, etc, but really? Nah. You can take the default human adepts and engineers to plat and topscore if you have proper team synergy. so I think that's way more important than class selection out of context.

For example, I took a geth trooper to plat yesterday. Friend I was playing with, default human engineer. fun fact: Proper flamer DOT stacking plus overload means fire explosions about every half second. I was priming multiple targets and he was detonating two at a time. It was, in a word, ridiculous. Two of us plus a so-so dude with Smash basically carried the fourth. Or the two of us doing that with a geth juggernaut holding the line completely carried another fourth.

And that's just two of us. Four people doing all tech bursts, like the (again, pub) game where we got a proper Paladin and GI (prox mine sets off explosions, is amazing). I was like "are we sure this is Platinum."

My very first platinum game was a wave 10 success the day platinum came out. We had four people using four different ammo powers and Falcons. I joined a lobby with 3 people using a Falcon X and Ammo IIIs, so I read the list and said "sure ok" and switched to a class, put a Falcon on, and an ammo power none of them were using. Worked. Falcons, okay. Falcons. Not exactly PRO TIER weaponry here.

I don't know about this part though. What matters in plat isn't so much your kit/build/strategy as it is what are your teammates doing. Biotics should work in pairs, minimum. An all tech burst team is amazing, etc. You probably want at least one person with boss-killing stupid high levels of DPS. But you can get those a lot of ways.

I know it's popular to think the only classes that can take plat are the ludicrously OP ones so AHI, TGI, AIU, etc, but really? Nah. You can take the default human adepts and engineers to plat and topscore if you have proper team synergy. so I think that's way more important than class selection out of context.

I've been PUG'ing Platinum lots of late, and I tend to stick to either support classes or ones that I know I can carry a wave if the shit hits the fan. But I wouldn't say I've played it "a lot."

It's not - in some ways - harder than Gold. Actually in some ways it's easier, like having fewer Marauders shooting you in the ass, since those are seriously more of a threat than a banshee. But it really does require you to know how to manage boss enemies for ten waves straight. More different than harder, I suppose. But it sounds intimidating, I know a lot of people broke plat for their first time because of the recent op, Lodestar, and were like "hey that wasn't so bad" when they finished.

Glacier plat farming (yes, again) is boring, though. Boring. People who only know how to do that don't actually know how to play ME3.

It's not - in some ways - harder than Gold. Actually in some ways it's easier, like having fewer Marauders shooting you in the ass, since those are seriously more of a threat than a banshee. But it really does require you to know how to manage boss enemies for ten waves straight. More different than harder, I suppose. But it sounds intimidating, I know a lot of people broke plat for their first time because of the recent op, Lodestar, and were like "hey that wasn't so bad" when they finished.

I'd cleared a few Platinum matches before Lodestar, but only playing with buddies who I know are good/great players. Lodestar was the first time I PUG'd Platinum on a regular basis, though ... and I had the same reaction: "Hey, that wasn't so bad ..."

So now when I'm just "playing" for fun, it's always Platinum. I have a few "Waves Completed" and "10 Extracts with," oh, and the fucking 200k points w/the Krysae left to complete. I generally drop down to Gold for Extractions, but when I'm on "200 Waves" I figure I might as well PUG Platinums with the character.

Quote:

Glacier plat farming (yes, again) is boring, though. Boring. People who only know how to do that don't actually know how to play ME3.

Rio Platinum farming isn't far behind ... most of the Platinum PUGs are either Glacier, Rio, or Giant. Glacier is just boring in general. I've held and intense hatred for that map for months. First it was FBW, then Glacier ... now I'm beginning to dislike Rio, although the objective rounds on Rio are much more challenging than the others, so I haven't completely soured on Rio just yet.

Rio is so slow. Giant and Glacier are at least fast, but Rio farmers make it take foreverrrrrrrrrr.

I've done a few glacier farms because I played on glacier so it was inevitable; same with Giant. Great way to get those 200 waves for any class with flamer so Vorcha whatever or Geth Trooper. You just stand behind the juggernaut and stack short bursts of fire on everything.

Then you realize that flamer on/off noise that frequently is really annoying and you hope your teammates hate you for it.

I'm not really against farming, sometimes you just need some spacebux. But I'm against only farming.

Shotgun mastery done. Your advice about using smart choke and a damage mod then ignoring the crosshairs was excellent. 5 games and fnished with the wraith. Only another 70 grabs to go as well. The balcony in london is quite handy for them i'm finding.

Singularity spec'd with Evolution 6B and Smash spec'd for Evolution 4A allows you to bring some serious biotic pain, but you're pretty squishy with default heath/shields of 500/500. Unless you can put a wall in between yourself and whatever elite you're attacking, you find yourself kissing the pavement as many times as you can pull off the Singularity-Smash-Smash-Sinularity Explosion double BE. Lash is happily useless against anything with armor, which means Elites.

I can make him shine on Gold with 6 in Fitness, Stronghold Package, and a CM. I've never really mastered the Novagaurd either, and I suppose the playstyle is somewhat similar. I should try playing Phoenix Adept as host with an Adrenaline Module and see if I can pull it off.

Shotgun mastery done. Your advice about using smart choke and a damage mod then ignoring the crosshairs was excellent. 5 games and fnished with the wraith. Only another 70 grabs to go as well. The balcony in london is quite handy for them i'm finding.

Glad it worked out for you. I found most of Giant and basically all of Dagger except for the tower to be great grab zones. Got plenty on those. Never tried the balcony on London but I can definitely see it.

personally I finished Bloodpack Mastery last night. Krogan Vanguard is really boring. Powerful, but boring. Still that's 23/25 for BOTB.

now I'm just looking "forward" to another 68 waves as a Volus adept and then I can stop playing volus forever.

It's fine if you get a good team together on gold, or else just put a gun on and play bronze and don't care beyond that. You can sleepwalk bronze with shield restore.

I'm only playing one Volus class to get BOTB. I could have skipped it but it's not like the alternates were very good: Phoenix Vanguard (no) Drell Vanguard (really no) Drell Assassin (probably should have done this but I'm already doing drell adept, wanted variety) - and Awakened Collector, which came out a bit late; I already had ~120 waves with volus adept before Reckoning dropped.

I did do 200 with the talon merc because he kinda owns now. I'm running this, at the moment. Saved me from those above classes. Your DPS output is flatly ludicrous with this.

If I were you I'd go with drell assassin over volus. Skip homing grenades, Recon mine + cloak + any gun = effective.

I agree. Drell Assassin is a super easy class to play. Cloak + Recon Mine means that you don't have to deal with the recon mine's super long cooldown, but you have to break cloak, either by kicking air or shooting your weapon. Like the huntress, get used to going into cloak before doing anything with recon mine, basically. Alternatively, take duration cloak and a charging weapon. Charge the gun before you enter cloak. Then neither homing grenade nor recon mine (firing or setting) nor firing off the charge will break your cloak. It's the ultimate hit-and-run class.

Trying to reliabily and quickly get that cloak boost on a recon mine detonation is kind of a pain in the ass; I'd consider speccing it for invasive scan and just pop it out, shoot anything in the field, detonate it as a final middle finger, then set up somewhere else.

That said, I have my drell assassin as a detonate-spec recon mine right now and it's actually pretty good as a trash cleanup ability, meaning I can carry a boss-killing sniper rifle (Jav, my Black Widow IX etc) and use recon mine on anything else. It works, but managing cloak/mine/cloak/shoot is a huge pain in the ass. Cloak/shoot and just use the mine when you use it if you go that route, IMO.

But it's really fun either way. Also, drell adept is really a lot of fun. You're a faster, more burst-damage capable Justicar with the tradeoff of being squishier. Run around and hit things with area reave, gun and cluster grenades all in one quick attack, then dash off for resupply. (Since you run to boxes constantly, take a Harrier)

That said, I have my drell assassin as a detonate-spec recon mine right now and it's actually pretty good as a trash cleanup ability, meaning I can carry a boss-killing sniper rifle (Jav, my Black Widow IX etc) and use recon mine on anything else. It works, but managing cloak/mine/cloak/shoot is a huge pain in the ass. Cloak/shoot and just use the mine when you use it if you go that route, IMO.

Well, I do cloak/mine/melee or cloak/mine/shoot to setup the recon mine, and cloak/mine/mine/shoot if I want to detonate. The mine is specced for damage up until Evo 6, where I still keep the debuff, which just makes shooting elites so much easier. It can be cumbersome to pull off, but after a few rounds it becomes fairly easy to do.

I've never really mastered the Novagaurd either, and I suppose the playstyle is somewhat similar.

Not really. Novaguard is primarily about blocking damage with charge/nova animations. You can sort of do the same thing with the sword animations on the slayer and you can sort of do similar things on the volus vanguard but those are only somewhat close since both kits can hang back while being effective so they lack the frenetic nature of the novaguard cycle.

Phoenix Adept always felt like a less effective Human Adept to me. I preferred the Vanguard with maxed melee and smash damage. Hunt the mooks with melee and the bosses with smash.

Psion wrote:

now I'm just looking "forward" to another 68 waves as a Volus adept and then I can stop playing volus forever.

I recommend doing a graal (my preference) or reegar with the volus adept. The orbs offset the weight penalty if you don't use the orbs, you can shield boost or boost/melee tank hack circles fine and you're not completely useless for the other seven waves.

right, I guess my point is it's too slow. I'm used to my infiltrators having very fast cloak/[action] cycles because all the rest of them do. Managing drell infitrator tends to mean waiting - either for a cooldown or for recon mine to become detonatable after you fire it, or whatever.

I mean yeah you can get in a rhythm with it but it's one that makes me irritated since I have to wait. My space world problems.

Not really. Novaguard is primarily about blocking damage with charge/nova animations. You can sort of do the same thing with the sword animations on the slayer and you can sort of do similar things on the volus vanguard but those are only somewhat close since both kits can hang back while being effective so they lack the frenetic nature of the novaguard cycle.

Phoenix Adept always felt like a less effective Human Adept to me. I preferred the Vanguard with maxed melee and smash damage. Hunt the mooks with melee and the bosses with smash.

I guess I was thinking Vanguards in general, in that it's more "twitch" based and therefore susceptible to host lag issues. It feels like I'm mashing buttons and my commands are being ignored.

The RNG is so insulting, sometimes. 3M in credits, three black cards, including appearance options for the Awakened Collector. A bunch of LIII and LIV consumables. I still have three UR weapons from the latest DLC that I haven't unlocked yet.

That, too ... although it's more that I'm just finished with Mass Effect. I'm not planning another epic 200 hour playthrough of the single player campaign again any time soon, I've completed most of the Multi-Player challenges, there's no more DLC coming out ... all that remains is meaningless grinding of challenge points and credits.

If they release an UR pack in the store perhaps I'll give it another go, but the effort/reward ratio is skewed unfavorably at this point. I'd rather be putting my gaming hours into something else, but my "default" behavior is to play MP in 2-3 30-45 minute segments per day, so I need to uninstall it.

So. Earlier this week I finally wrapped my Insanity playthrough of ME2, something I had previously struggled with. Yesterday I finally found the time to jump back into singleplayer ME3, which I haven't actually played for... I don't know. 10 months?

Holy damn, guys, how did I get so good at this game?!

The difference is insane. I thought I was playing on Casual (I was playing on Hardcore). I have more powers than I can possibly know what to do with. Things are dying all over the place. Except me. I am not dying.

Thank you, Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer, for improving my gameplay so dramatically that I actually kind of feel like Shepard is a legitimate badass.

Yesterday I finally found the time to jump back into singleplayer ME3, which I haven't actually played for... I don't know. 10 months?

Holy damn, guys, how did I get so good at this game?!

I know, it's completely crazy. I went back to play the SP DLC recently, and I couldn't tell a serious difference in difficulty between normal and insanity, to the point where I wondered if the difficulty meter was just broken. The funny thing though was I was playing as Infiltrator, and I completely forgot how to play with the time dilation effect that kicks in when scoping in with sniper rifles. I wasn't leading targets right and miscounting my rate of fire, but it still didn't really stop me from cleaning house.

The only thing harder about SP compared to MP is that medi-gel can't be used after you fall, so you need to use them as op-packs instead of medigel. Big whoop.

Yesterday I finally found the time to jump back into singleplayer ME3, which I haven't actually played for... I don't know. 10 months?

Holy damn, guys, how did I get so good at this game?!

I know, it's completely crazy. I went back to play the SP DLC recently, and I couldn't tell a serious difference in difficulty between normal and insanity, to the point where I wondered if the difficulty meter was just broken. The funny thing though was I was playing as Infiltrator, and I completely forgot how to play with the time dilation effect that kicks in when scoping in with sniper rifles. I wasn't leading targets right and miscounting my rate of fire, but it still didn't really stop me from cleaning house.

The only thing harder about SP compared to MP is that medi-gel can't be used after you fall, so you need to use them as op-packs instead of medigel. Big whoop.

Yeah but ... you NEVER fall after playing Multi-Player.

Agreed with all of the above - the Single Player Campaign was ridiculously easy after nearly a year of playing multi-player. Wait - you mean I can actually control my squadmates use of powers? Oh, this is too easy. Oh lookie, we have to deal with A Banshee ... I'm really scared now!

I used my squaddies as primers, and I detonated everything with Warp. I didn't even have to shoot at anything until those stupid husks and Marauder Shields.

So, I think I may give up Best of the Best due to Lone Wolf. Just wasted 35 minutes getting to Wave 6 successfully on Vancouver with a Kroguard, only for the last enemy of the wave to glitch out out of scope and become unkillable.

If you've got a hitscan power you can still get them, no projectiles work. I've had a team watch my kill a stack of stuck cerberus troopers because i was the only one that could do any damage.

I've now promoted every class 6 times. Yet i have 35 promotions apparently. Someone can't do maths and i think it's bioware. I also have another achievement at 112%. If i lose another promotion i'm not bothering with N7. I'll be damned if i'm going to stop before i get those grabs though, 37 to go!